Reviews
aleks.sierz
The 1980s were a great decade for British women playwrights. During those Thatcher-dominated years, Caryl Churchill produced two world-class masterpieces – Top Girls and Serious Money – while a host of other playwrights, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, April De Angelis, Charlotte Keatley, Sarah Daniels, Winsome Pinnock and Andrea Dunbar lit up our stages. Many of them experimented boldly with the structure of their plays, using time shifts and different storytelling techniques to give a forceful picture of women’s life experiences.The central event of the play happens offstageThe late Clare Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Hot on the heels of Katherine Soper's award-winning Wish List, about the UK benefits system in crisis, and John Godber's This Might Hurt, about an NHS in crisis, comes this play about our education system in crisis. One suspects there will be plenty more plays about comparable flashpoints to come, but the passionate arguments found within Alex MacKeith's somewhat over-zealous debut play definitely hit home. Set in the headteacher's office of a south London primary school on SAT results day, the play vividly outlines the dilemmas at its heart. Schools must adhere to rigid systems based on Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…One of the many ironies of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s massive novel partly set in 1940s London, is that what follows these opening lines (760 pages in the original edition) actually occurs in the blink of an eye: the time it takes for the falling bomb to hit the sitting ducks in a picturehouse audience. Viewers of The Halcyon have known a bomb explodes at a party to celebrate the luxury hotel’s 50th year in November 1940 ever since the first episode eight weeks ago. Tonight we learned Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew Lloyd Webber as a breeding ground for musicals, opens with the UK premiere of an established show: Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s 2000 version of Joseph Moncure March’s initially banned narrative poem about the excesses of the vaudevillian Roaring Twenties.Curiously, Andrew Lippa provided a competing musical take on March’s tale in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Slipped out in the Storyville slot without much fanfare, Life, Animated is the Oscar-nominated documentary which won a theatrical release and rave reviews in the US and UK last year. It’s a horribly clichéd word, but heart-warming is the best way to describe this tale of a young autistic man, Owen Suskind, who learnt to speak via his passion for Disney animations.We first see Owen in home movie footage, a chatty toddler play-acting Peter Pan with his dad. But soon after that footage was shot, he lost all his speech and began to display other worrying signs – problems with motor control, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new work by Igor Stravinsky is always going to be a major event, so Sunday evening’s UK premiere of his rediscovered Funeral Song was hotly anticipated. The score disappeared after its first performance and was thought lost in the Russian Revolution, but the orchestral parts were rediscovered at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015, and, after a modern premiere at the Mariinsky in December last year, the work is now being performed around the world.Funeral Song is an early work, dating from 1908, but it’s not juvenilia. Written as a memorial to Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What if the Germans had won the war?” has been a recurring theme in fiction, from Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time to Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland. There was even a predictive pre-war “future history” version, in the form of Katherine Burdekin’s 1937 novel, Swastika Night.In SS-GB, tellified from Len Deighton’s novel by writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who’ve written all the recent Bond movies), it’s November 1941. The RAF’s famous “Few” having failed to stem the Nazi onslaught – the blackly-ironic opening sequence showed us a Spitfire flown by Read more ...
David Nice
Polish composer Szymanowski's Ovid triptych Mythes achieved something like cult status thanks to an iridescent recording. Everyone knew the pianist, the great Krystian Zimerman; the violinist, Kaja Danczowska, less so (where is she now?). A better-known duo of equals, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov, could – if crazes reached so far in the classical world these days – make listeners no less obsessed with two relative unknowns in the second half of their spellbinding programme, the 71-year-old Fauré's quietly radical Second Violin Sonata and George Antheil's 1923 anti-sonata for violin, Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
A sniper is a thinking man’s soldier. The aloof assassin is always outnumbered but never outgunned, a patient predator and considered killer. It sounds quite glam, doesn’t it? But it’s a soup-for-one profession and ranks high on the dullness detector. There’s all that hanging around to contend with. Checking your kit, waiting for the right conditions. Waiting, waiting, always with the waiting. A bit like fishing, without the desire to boast about the one that got away.Fortunately, Sniper Elite 4 knows that shooter fans have a low patience threshold and has tools in place to counterbalance the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Novelist Jake Arnott has an eye for seedy glamour. The Fatal Tree takes the 1720s underworld - the setting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, one of the most successful of all time - and adds more sex and a slick story, to make this rivetingly vivid tale. Having established himself as pre-eminent gangland chronicler with the trilogy that began with The Long Firm (1999), he moved onto Seventies glamrock, and Belle Epoque Paris. Here, he has a situation so pungently evocative, it’s as if a character in the background of a Hogarth sketch has come suddenly to life. The Fatal Tree is narrated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On first pass, Beautica comes across as an exotic hybrid of 1991 school-of-Slowdive shoegazing and the fidgety music pre-Stereolab outfit McCarthy had perfected around 1989. But there’s something else; a lilting characteristic to the vocal melodies suggesting an inherent melancholy. Yet although the album’s makers were not bouncing with joy, the hymnal sense of reflection running throughout Bizarre’s Beautica is, contrastingly, uplifting.The timeline just-about fits. Beautica, reissued this week, was first released in 1994 after shoegazing’s first flush, when those still pursuing the music Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock. That the Read more ...